Zaitcev: What kind of laptop? I wrote a
mini-HOWTO for internal use at our company on how to set up
our toshiba satellite 4080XCDTs to work with our Palm
Vx's...it's nice being able to sync/backup over IR. If you
want, I could get it to you next week...course, you'll
probably have figured it out by then :)

Dacta:
I worked in a VB shop at my last job. You're going to burn
in hell for that comment :-)
In actuality, VB does what it was designed for very well -
Rapid application development. If you need a quick demo of a
concept it's really simple to whip something up in about 5
minutes. However, go beyond that, and it becomes an ungodly
horror. I much preferred Borland's C++ Builder (probably
would have liked Delphi too but never got a chance to use
it) when forced to do windows coding. Now I don't have to
worry about any of that since I have a geek linux job :)

Attended LWE the past week. I spent more time at the Debian
booth than any other place at the conference, even though I
wasn't techinically working it...I just had more fun there.
Went schwag hunting for my coworkers. Attended a few
conference sessions, but many were too suit-oriented...I
guess what do you expect at a conference geared for
businesses. People loved the G3 powerbook I brought to the
show...a shame that we didn't have any debian ppc cds to
hand out. Surfing on the airport/wavelan was kickass until
thursday, when the andover people apparently cut almost
everyone off it (but that was ok, because debian had a
wavelan base station in the booth :) Food was expensive, no
real restaurants around the hotel and room service was
so-so. Ate at a place called original joe's on wednesday
for lunch, expensive for rather mediocre food (I ordered
steak medium, it got to me well done :/ ...). Went to the
Debian release party at the Usual wednesday night...free
beer, woohoo. Linus showed up as I was near the door...felt
sorry for him being asked for autographs ... let the man
enjoy his beer and the party. Didn't get too trashed...I
stopped after four or five beers. Shaleh, calc, and neuro
partook in "Irish carbombs". After a bit neuro, calc, and I
headed over to the gnome party across the street which was
so-so...then went over to the pool hall and shot some pool.
Linus was playing pool with some people, I thought that was
neat. Took the light rail back to the hotel around
11:30ish.

It was fun hanging out with the debian crew (shaleh, joey,
drow, calc, lilo, myth, o-o, wichert, jim, tausq, dave),
meeting the enlightenment/#e crowd (raster, mandrake,
keebler, teletron, term, hakker, gnea, demonishi, kainx,
fusion94, nettwerk), the stormix people, peter teichman from
helixcode, and many others that I may have forgotten to
mention. Did a bunch of GPG keysigning last night.

I am moving departments in my company, from systems
architecture to operations, due to reorganizations after my
boss passed away. My new boss appears to be clueful to
linux and open to ideas, so that is good. I hope things go
well. I will be moving to another floor towards the end of
september, leaving the other linux geeks :( But I will come
back up to pester them now and then, since I am basically
going to be implementing what projects they come up with...

Going on a cruise this coming week. Yes, right in the
middle of hurricane season...I hope to have a good time. I
have done/will have done more flying in the past two weeks
than I have in my entire life. Strange. Coache decidedly
sucks. In the future, I'll probably shell out the extra
bucks for coach if possible.

School starts the monday after I get back from the cruise.
Lovely.
Retaking the two math classes I failed in the spring, along
with a CS course and a digital electronics course...should
be interesting. At least there won't be anymore 3 hour
trips to go visit my fiancee every week.

My brother and sister go to college a week from today. That
will leave only my parents, my youngest brother, and I. It
will be strange having the house so quiet.

No one probably cares about this, just typing thoughts as
they come to my mind...but oh well, no one's forcing you to
read this :)
I think one day in the near future I will move my advogato
diary entries to my personal page and use advogato only for
discussion of free software stuff, as it was intended...

beldon:
If this Rob you speak of is Robert Bruce McLaughlin, I and
many others share in your pain. He was the head of the
department at
the company I work for (Winstar). He passed away on July
12th as well, and we are located in the DC area... someone
else pointed out your diary to me and I was struck by how
much it sounded like Bob. He worked almost exclusively with
younger children, especially with math and sciences... he
was a friend and mentor to us all. I'd be interested in
knowing if you knew him...let me know.

If it was someone else, the strange coincidences there are
in the world.